Fujifilm’s New Compact Camera Is a Mirrorless Selfie Machine

The new Fujifilm X-A2 has a 3-inch LCD that flips all the way up, facing forward for selfies. Fujifilm

The Fujifilm X-T1 was one of our favorite cameras of 2014. Now it has a compact cousin with a timeless look.

The Fujifilm X-A2 is a new mirrorless model built around a 16-megapixel APS-C sensor—a different imager than the one in the X-T1, as it’s a Bayer-filter sensor rather than Fuji’s proprietary X-Trans array—and it uses Fujifilm’s X-mount lenses.

Despite its throwback aesthetic, the camera is made with a modern-day craze in mind: You can flip the 3-inch LCD on the back up so it faces forward, helping you frame selfies. We’ve seen a similar feature before on Olympus’s PEN E-PL7. Of course, you don’t have to use the camera for selfies. We’d prefer you didn’t, actually.

The X-A2 has a mode dial and a command dial up top for adjusting manual exposure controls and shooting modes. ISO extends up to 25600, the camera shoots RAW, and Fujifilm claims the autofocus speed is 0.3 seconds. That’s slower than the X-T1’s blazing 0.08-seconds, but it’s still fairly quick.

In movie mode, the X-A2 shoots 1080p video at 30fps, and the camera has built-in Wi-Fi for offloading images and controlling it via an app. It’s not available just yet, but it will cost $550 with a 16-50mm/F3.5-5.6 kit lens starting in February. Kit lenses are fine and all, but you’ll probably want to crank it up to one of Fuji’s 23mm f/1.4 lenses for all your selfies and non-selfies.

Undercover Agent Reveals How He Helped The FBI Trap Silk Road’s Ross Ulbricht

In this courtroom sketch, defendant Ross Ulbricht listens to proceedings from the defense table during opening arguments in his criminal trial in New York, Tuesday, Jan. 13, 2015. Elizabeth Wlliams/AP

Nothing about the identification and arrest of Ross Ulbricht in the science fiction section of a San Franciso public library in October of 2013 was left to chance. When the FBI grabbed his laptop and put him in cuffs, the prosecution in Ulbricht’s case has said he was chatting online with an undercover agent who had infiltrated the staff of Silk Road, the massive online drug market Ulbricht is accused of creating. Now that undercover agent has told his story for the first time. And he’s revealed that just before his fateful conversation with Silk Road’s kingpin, he had been watching Ulbricht from less than a block away.

On the second day of Ulbricht’s trial in a Manhattan courtroom, Department of Homeland Security agent Jared Deryeghiayan told the jury a detailed account of his final conversation with the Dread Pirate Roberts, Silk Road’s owner and Deryeghiayan’s boss for the three months the DHS agent spent as an undercover Silk Road staffer. As part of a coordinated law enforcement effort designed to prove that Ulbricht was the Dread Pirate Roberts and to seize his laptop before he could encrypt its hard drive, Deryeghiayan and a half dozen FBI agents surveilled Ulbricht as he left his apartment and walked to the Glen Park public library near his home. Then Deryeghiayan struck up a conversation with the Ulbricht over a dedicated chat system set up for Silk Road staffers, the better to catch Ulbricht red-handed in the act of managing the site.

“The plan for the arrest…was to get him into a position where we could have him in a public setting, and I could initiate a chat with him,” Deryeghiayan said in response to questions from prosecuctor Serrin Turner. “The purpose was that if indeed [the Dread Pirate Roberts] was Ross Ulbricht, we could get his computer in an open, unencrypted state.”

Deryeghiayan, an agent based in Chicago, had actually infiltrated the Silk Road nearly two years earlier. He told the court that he had “taken over” and controlled the accounts of many buyers and sellers on the site, presumably users of the Silk Road who had been caught in illegal acts and cooperated with law enforcement to lessen their punishment. As an undercover buyer, he said he made more than fifty purchases of drugs on the site from more than 40 dealers in 10 countries.

Then in late July of 2013, Deryeghiayan says he took over the account of “Cirrus,” a moderator on Silk Road’s user forums (who had earlier gone by the name “scout”) responsible for customer support and cleaning up spam and inappropriate comments in the forum. In that role, he often communicated by encrypted chat with the Dread Pirate Roberts—username: “dread”—via a special chat server called Staff Chat run on the anonymity network Tor. In exchange for ten to twelves hours a day of helping to administer and maintain the Silk Road and its community forums, Deryeghiayan says he was paid about $1,000 a week in bitcoins. (The coins, he says, were immediately converted to dollars and seized by the U.S. government.)

Deryeghiayan says he only learned the name Ross Ulbricht in September, from Internal Revenue Service agent Gary Alford, who had also been investigating the Silk Road. Ulbricht, he told the court “looked like a pretty good match.”

A map showing the location of Bello Coffee, where the DHS’s DerYeghiayan stalked Ulbricht, and the Glen Park library where he was arrested a few minutes later.

Later that month, Deryeghiayan flew to San Francisco, and on October 1st met up with the New York-based FBI team led by agent Christopher Tarbell. The FBI agents had watched Ulbricht as he worked the day before at a coffeeshop near his home called Bello Coffee. So Deryeghiayan says he set up near the cafe with a laptop connected to the Internet via a mobile hotspot, and then went into the cafe to charge his laptop’s battery. All the while, he was closely watching the “dread” name on Staff Chat, which remained online.

At 2:47pm, “dread” went offline, Deryeghiayan says, the cue that Ulbricht was leaving his house for his favorite public wifi connection. Deryeghiayan alerted the FBI agents and left the cafe to sit on a bench on the same block.

As Deryeghiayan and FBI agent Tom Kiernan watched from just a few feet away, Ulbricht walked up to the corner with a “small shoulder bag” containing his laptop. He waited for the light to turn green, then crossed and went into Bello Coffee. Thirty seconds later, he left the crowded cafe, seemingly to find a quieter spot, and headed for the Glen Park Public Library just one street north.

The FBI followed Ulbricht into the library, and Tarbell sent an email to the team, telling them to “make sure to pull the laptop first, then arrest,” according to Deryeghiayan. He added that the team should “give time to the [undercover agent] to chat [with Ulbricht] before anyone initiates an arrest.”

At 3:08pm, Ulbricht opened up his computer at a table in the library, and “dread” came online. With his laptop open and logged on to Staff Chat, Deryeghian walked over to library and up one of its stairwells to a discreet spot. Then he started a carefully planned conversation designed to make sure Ulbricht logged into a part of the Silk Road site designed for moderating comments flagged as spam. (“We were trying to get him online as DPR in the market as well as chatting,” Deryeghian says.)

cirrus: hey

Can you check out one of the flagged messages for me?

dread: you did bitcoin exchange before you worked for me, right?

cirrus: yes, but just for a little bit

dread: not any more than that?

cirrus: no, I stopped because of reporting regulations

dread: damn regulators, eh?

oh, which post?

cirrus: lol, yep

dread: there was the one with the atlantis

At that moment, Deryeghian say the FBI grabbed Ulbricht’s laptop and arrested him. “I sent a message to Tarbell that he should effect the arrest,” says Deryeghian. “I was for waiting for a sign…As soon as he said ‘oh, which post’, I knew he was on the flagged message page.” The Dread Pirate Roberts’ last words referred to a competing Dark Web drug market known as Atlantis that had mysteriously shut down just a few days earlier.

Deryeghian’s account will no doubt be used by the prosecution to demonstrate to the jury that the Dread Pirate Roberts is in fact Ross Ulbricht, the central question of the trial. But in its opening argument yesterday, Ulbricht’s defense laid out a narrative in which the Dread Pirate Roberts inherited the site from Ulbricht just a few months after it was created, and then years later set up Ulbricht as the “perfect fall guy.” It hasn’t yet explained how the “real” Dread Pirate Roberts would have planted evidence on Ulbricht’s laptop including a journal and logbook detailing his management of the Silk Road, nor why Ulbricht would logged into the Silk Road’s admin page and communicating as “dread” until the moment of his arrest.

Deryeghian, however, is only the first witness in Ulbricht’s trial, and has yet to even be cross-examined by the defense. Ulbricht’s lawyers will no doubt have their own story about the day of his arrest. His lead attorney Joshua Dratel began on Tuesday by calling attention to the absurdity of Ulbricht using a public library’s connection to manage a highly secretive drug empire.

“[The Dread Pirate Roberts] is someone who studiously avoided revealing his identity to anyone on the site…This same person goes to a public library and uses a public Wifi connection?” Dratel asked the jury. “That Ross is DPR is a contradiction so fundamental that it defies common sense.”

Puerto Rico Will Be Ground Zero for Google’s Modular Smartphone Test

Google’s much-anticipated modular smartphone will make its way to consumers this year. A pilot project—which will use food truck-style vans to get the devices into users hands so they can try before they buy—is set to debut in Puerto Rico before the end of 2015.

The announcement about the market pilot was made at the Project Ara developers conference in Mountain View, California. Regina Dugan, the Googler in charge of the ambitious attempt to design and market a fully modular, part-swappable Android phone, made the announcement. Claro and Open Mobile, two cell networks on the U.S.-governed island territory, are partners in the pilot. Google also said it would have over 20 modules available for people to use when customizing their phones by the time the pilot launches.

The video shown at the launch announcement is embedded above. It also shows how Ara’s modules will work.

This pilot will give developers, manufacturers and the Ara team a better understanding of the commercial realities and consumer demands surrounding modular phones. It will also provide answers to vital questions before Ara hits larger markets. For example: Which common problems will users encounter? How can customer support teams help? Which modules or types of modules will go over well and which will fall flat? How will consumers use the modules to customize the mobile experience?

Though endeavors like Project Ara are often fraught with such uncertainties, if there’s one absolute truth embedded in the frame of this modular phone, it’s that the commercial success of Project Ara could dramatically alter the relationship users have with their mobile devices. Namely, the way they carry them and customize them, their decisions about when to upgrade, and how they go about replacing broken or unsatisfactory components.

It could be more than just a chance to explore new device designs. It could point to a major transformation in mobile computing where it’s no longer just the software of the device—the apps that run on the phone—that’s open to customization by the user, but the entire functionality and build of the phone itself.

A similar event for Asian developers will be held next week, January 21, in Singapore.

Samsung May Buy BlackBerry, Report Says

Galaxy Note Edge smart phones are on display at the Samsung booth during the International CES, Tuesday, Jan. 6, 2015, in Las Vegas. John Locher/WIRED

BlackBerry may soon disappear into Samsung, according to a new report.

On Wednesday, Reuters reported that South Korean smartphone giant Samsung approached BlackBerry to buy the beleaguered company for as much as $7.5 billion, citing a person familiar with the matter and unspecified documents. According to the news agency, Samsung is looking to acquire BlackBerry for its patent portfolio.

According to Reuters’ source, Samsung proposed an initial price range of $13.35 to $15.49 per share—38 percent to 60 percent more than BlackBerry’s current trading price. If accurate, the bid would put BlackBerry’s valuation at $6 billion to $7.5 billion, after taking the company’s $1.25 billion debt into consideration, according to the documents seen by Reuters.

Reuters’ source has also claimed that executives from the two companies, along with advisers, met last week to discuss the arrangement. BlackBerry and Samsung have yet to comment publicly on the deal.

BlackBerry has found itself in dire straits for quite some time now. Over a year after the Canadian firm appointed a new CEO, John Chen, to save the company, it has not seen much improvement in profits. According to a December report, Chen was able to cut down losses from $148 million compared to $4.4 billion decline in earnings last year, and attempted to reform its business into a software-and-services company.

Apple and Ericsson Are Still Suing Each Other Over Phone Patents

Ni ni/Getty Images

Apple and Swedish wireless technology giant Ericsson are still fighting over royalties and patents.

On Tuesday, Apple filed a lawsuit in the US District Court for Northern California, saying that Ericsson is demanding excessive royalties for its patents and claiming that Ericsson’s patents are not “essential” for the Long Term Evolution (LTE) wireless communication standard the Cupertino company uses in its smartphones and tablets. Then on Wednesday, Ericsson fired back, asking a federal court for a verdict on whether or not its fees are fair.

A popular phone maker in the 1990s, Ericsson sold its mobile-phone business to Sony in February 2012, five years after Apple introduced the first iPhone. Apple’s smartphones and tablets have long won users over, but the iPhone maker is saying Ericsson is still trying to extract as much (unwarranted) value from its portfolio of patents as it can. “Ericsson seeks to exploit its patents to take the value of these cutting-edge Apple innovations, which resulted from years of hard work by Apple engineers and designers and billions of dollars of Apple research and development—and which have nothing to do with Ericsson’s patents,” Apple said in its complaint.

In the world of tech, patent suits are commonplace, as companies jostle one another in an effort to push the limits of innovation—and make boatloads of money in the process. Recently, the patent wars have cooled. Notably, controversial consortium Rockstar—which is made up of Apple, Microsoft, and other big tech companies—recently agreed to sell 4,000 patents that were part of some high-profile lawsuits, and Apple and Samsung have settled some of their patent litigation. But that doesn’t mean the patent wars are over.

The Price of Bitcoin Doesn’t Matter Right Now

Balloons bearing the bitcoin logo float above the floor at the Inside Bitcoins conference and trade show, on Monday, April 7, 2014 in New York. The balloons are part of a promotional effort by London-based Cloud Hashing, a bitcoin mining company. Mark Lennihan/AP

The price of Bitcoin has taken bit of a dive over the last couple of days, shedding over 20 percent of its value in the last 24 hours. The sell-off, like other sell-offs and rallies before it, draws a lot of attention and questions about what it means for the future of the technology. Here’s why I don’t focus on price much.

Bitcoin is best thought of as a 5- to 10-year project, and we’re at the very early stages. An (admittedly imperfect) analogy is the early Web.

Jerry Brito

Jerry Brito is executive director of Coin Center, a non-profit research and advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C. focused on the public policy issues facing cryptocurrency technologies such as Bitcoin.

Like the early Web, Bitcoin is an open platform that no one owns, and on top of which anyone can build without having to get anyone else’s permission. And just like the early Web, success requires investors, entrepreneurs, and developers to build out the infrastructure and applications that will make it useful to average users.

The World Wide Web was conceived by Tim Berners-Lee; he published a paper proposing it in March of 1989. The following year he worked to implement the idea in code, making the first website in December of 1990. The first popular Web browser didn’t come until 1993 when Marc Andreessen and the team at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications released Mosaic. The following year Andreessen started Netscape and released the Netscape Navigator browser in 1994.

Those of us old enough to remember using Navigator to browse the Web over a Winsock connection on a 56k baud modem can attest that it was not the amazing experience we take for granted today. In fact, if you couldn’t see that the technology would evolve, you would have concluded that it was practically useless. For one thing, there was no easy way to find things on the Web. Well, we didn’t get Google until 1998.

Google is now the most visited website on the planet. Second to it is Facebook, and for many people the Web is virtually synonymous with social networking. Yet Facebook was not founded until 2004–a full 14 years after the Web was first conceived.

So here’s the parallel: Bitcoin was conceived by Satoshi Nakamoto and proposed in a paper published in 2008. He worked on implementing the idea into code, mining the first block of the blockchain in January of 2009. So, if we take the Web as a parallel, we’re at the stage in Bitcoin were we would hope to see a Mosaic level development, not a Facebook.

In other words, it’s early days. The Googles and Facebooks of Bitcoin–the killer apps that will make the technology indispensable for ordinary users–may not come for another 5 years.

Unlike the early Web, though, Bitcoin has a price ticker people look at daily, and so they wring their hands. Every dip and spike in the price gets a lot of attention and spells either doom or “irrational exuberance.” But as Marc Andreessen has pointed out, “the price of domain names didn’t determine the usefulness of the Internet.”

With a longer time horizon in mind, you can put the short-term drops and rallies in price of Bitcoin in perspective. So don’t worry so much.

White House Backs Cities That Want to Build Their Own Super-Speed Internet

Richard Robert McKeever, a fiber install technician for US Internet Corp., adjusts fiber optic internet cable so it does not become tangled during installation in Minneapolis, Minnesota, US, on Thursday, Sept. 11, 2013. Ariana Lindquist/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Five years before Google Fiber came to Kansas City, the residents of Chattanooga, Tennessee were already enjoying the ultra-fast speeds of gigabit internet speeds. But those connections didn’t come from a private company like Google. They came from the municipally owned utility.

Chattanooga isn’t alone. Cities like Wilson, North Carolina and Lafayette, Louisiana have likewise given up on waiting for private companies and started their own ultra-highspeed internet services. But some community efforts have been stymied by state laws prohibiting governments from competing with private internet providers.

Critics of these laws have long argued that they protect entrenched telecommunications companies at the expense of customers who need and want faster, cheaper service, while defenders of the laws say it’s unfair to make private companies compete with tax funded government agencies that don’t need to turn a profit to survive. On Tuesday, President Obama sided with the critics.

“The Obama Administration believes that consumers should have the option to provide themselves broadband services through local government and locally-owned utilities and that state and local policy should support a level playing field for these community-based solutions,” reads a White House report on community broadband initiatives.

The debate over the future of municipal broadband is central to both the economic development of communities across the US—and to the future of investment in broadband infrastructure. Improvements to the state of broadband can’t come soon enough. The US lags behind countries like South Korea and the Czech Republic in both speed and cost of internet access.

Sure, the rise of Google Fiber has spurred competition both in cities lke Austin, where Google has only recently begun rolling out service, and areas that some providers think could be next on Google’s list. But there’s no guarantee that Google Fiber will spread beyond a very limited number of cities, and some communities are being left further behind in the broadband revolution than others. While 94 percent of Americans living in urban areas can purchase broadband faster than 25mbps, only 51 percent of rural Americans can purchase access at those speeds, according to the report.

The report also says that 30 percent of homes have no broadband connection, and high prices for access is a big part of that. Plus, there’s not much competition in most cities: 40 percent of US citizens have only one company in their area that can provide fixed line connections faster than 10mbps—if they have any option at that speed at all. “Without strong competition, providers can (and do) raise prices, delay investments, and provide sub-par quality of service,” the report says.

Projects such as those in Chattanooga bring much needed competition to their communities, but these projects don’t always work out well. Provo, Utah financed a municipal network that struggled for years before it was eventually acquired by Google Fiber.

But the report argues that the mere possibility of having to compete with municipal projects can improve service from private companies, citing a study that found that cable television providers were more likely to upgrade their infrastructure if they faced the threat that municipal utilities would enter their markets. And if there’s one thing that just about everyone in the debate agrees on, it’s that we need more competition in the broadband sector.

Samsung May Buy BlackBerry, Report Says

Galaxy Note Edge smart phones are on display at the Samsung booth during the International CES, Tuesday, Jan. 6, 2015, in Las Vegas. John Locher/WIRED

BlackBerry may soon disappear into Samsung, according to a new report.

On Wednesday, Reuters reported that South Korean smartphone giant Samsung approached BlackBerry to buy the beleaguered company for as much as $7.5 billion, citing a person familiar with the matter and unspecified documents. According to the news agency, Samsung is looking to acquire BlackBerry for its patent portfolio.

According to Reuters’ source, Samsung proposed an initial price range of $13.35 to $15.49 per share—38 percent to 60 percent more than BlackBerry’s current trading price. If accurate, the bid would put BlackBerry’s valuation at $6 billion to $7.5 billion, after taking the company’s $1.25 billion debt into consideration, according to the documents seen by Reuters.

Reuters’ source has also claimed that executives from the two companies, along with advisers, met last week to discuss the arrangement. BlackBerry and Samsung have yet to comment publicly on the deal.

BlackBerry has found itself in dire straits for quite some time now. Over a year after the Canadian firm appointed a new CEO, John Chen, to save the company, it has not seen much improvement in profits. According to a December report, Chen was able to cut down losses from $148 million compared to $4.4 billion decline in earnings last year, and attempted to reform its business into a software-and-services company.

Apple and Ericsson Are Still Suing Each Other Over Phone Patents

Ni ni/Getty Images

Apple and Swedish wireless technology giant Ericsson are still fighting over royalties and patents.

On Tuesday, Apple filed a lawsuit in the US District Court for Northern California, saying that Ericsson is demanding excessive royalties for its patents and claiming that Ericsson’s patents are not “essential” for the Long Term Evolution (LTE) wireless communication standard the Cupertino company uses in its smartphones and tablets. Then on Wednesday, Ericsson fired back, asking a federal court for a verdict on whether or not its fees are fair.

A popular phone maker in the 1990s, Ericsson sold its mobile-phone business to Sony in February 2012, five years after Apple introduced the first iPhone. Apple’s smartphones and tablets have long won users over, but the iPhone maker is saying Ericsson is still trying to extract as much (unwarranted) value from its portfolio of patents as it can. “Ericsson seeks to exploit its patents to take the value of these cutting-edge Apple innovations, which resulted from years of hard work by Apple engineers and designers and billions of dollars of Apple research and development—and which have nothing to do with Ericsson’s patents,” Apple said in its complaint.

In the world of tech, patent suits are commonplace, as companies jostle one another in an effort to push the limits of innovation—and make boatloads of money in the process. Recently, the patent wars have cooled. Notably, controversial consortium Rockstar—which is made up of Apple, Microsoft, and other big tech companies—recently agreed to sell 4,000 patents that were part of some high-profile lawsuits, and Apple and Samsung have settled some of their patent litigation. But that doesn’t mean the patent wars are over.

The Price of Bitcoin Doesn’t Matter Right Now

Balloons bearing the bitcoin logo float above the floor at the Inside Bitcoins conference and trade show, on Monday, April 7, 2014 in New York. The balloons are part of a promotional effort by London-based Cloud Hashing, a bitcoin mining company. Mark Lennihan/AP

The price of Bitcoin has taken bit of a dive over the last couple of days, shedding over 20 percent of its value in the last 24 hours. The sell-off, like other sell-offs and rallies before it, draws a lot of attention and questions about what it means for the future of the technology. Here’s why I don’t focus on price much.

Bitcoin is best thought of as a 5- to 10-year project, and we’re at the very early stages. An (admittedly imperfect) analogy is the early Web.

Jerry Brito

Jerry Brito is executive director of Coin Center, a non-profit research and advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C. focused on the public policy issues facing cryptocurrency technologies such as Bitcoin.

Like the early Web, Bitcoin is an open platform that no one owns, and on top of which anyone can build without having to get anyone else’s permission. And just like the early Web, success requires investors, entrepreneurs, and developers to build out the infrastructure and applications that will make it useful to average users.

The World Wide Web was conceived by Tim Berners-Lee; he published a paper proposing it in March of 1989. The following year he worked to implement the idea in code, making the first website in December of 1990. The first popular Web browser didn’t come until 1993 when Marc Andreessen and the team at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications released Mosaic. The following year Andreessen started Netscape and released the Netscape Navigator browser in 1994.

Those of us old enough to remember using Navigator to browse the Web over a Winsock connection on a 56k baud modem can attest that it was not the amazing experience we take for granted today. In fact, if you couldn’t see that the technology would evolve, you would have concluded that it was practically useless. For one thing, there was no easy way to find things on the Web. Well, we didn’t get Google until 1998.

Google is now the most visited website on the planet. Second to it is Facebook, and for many people the Web is virtually synonymous with social networking. Yet Facebook was not founded until 2004–a full 14 years after the Web was first conceived.

So here’s the parallel: Bitcoin was conceived by Satoshi Nakamoto and proposed in a paper published in 2008. He worked on implementing the idea into code, mining the first block of the blockchain in January of 2009. So, if we take the Web as a parallel, we’re at the stage in Bitcoin were we would hope to see a Mosaic level development, not a Facebook.

In other words, it’s early days. The Googles and Facebooks of Bitcoin–the killer apps that will make the technology indispensable for ordinary users–may not come for another 5 years.

Unlike the early Web, though, Bitcoin has a price ticker people look at daily, and so they wring their hands. Every dip and spike in the price gets a lot of attention and spells either doom or “irrational exuberance.” But as Marc Andreessen has pointed out, “the price of domain names didn’t determine the usefulness of the Internet.”

With a longer time horizon in mind, you can put the short-term drops and rallies in price of Bitcoin in perspective. So don’t worry so much.

White House Backs Cities That Want to Build Their Own Super-Speed Internet

Richard Robert McKeever, a fiber install technician for US Internet Corp., adjusts fiber optic internet cable so it does not become tangled during installation in Minneapolis, Minnesota, US, on Thursday, Sept. 11, 2013. Ariana Lindquist/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Five years before Google Fiber came to Kansas City, the residents of Chattanooga, Tennessee were already enjoying the ultra-fast speeds of gigabit internet speeds. But those connections didn’t come from a private company like Google. They came from the municipally owned utility.

Chattanooga isn’t alone. Cities like Wilson, North Carolina and Lafayette, Louisiana have likewise given up on waiting for private companies and started their own ultra-highspeed internet services. But some community efforts have been stymied by state laws prohibiting governments from competing with private internet providers.

Critics of these laws have long argued that they protect entrenched telecommunications companies at the expense of customers who need and want faster, cheaper service, while defenders of the laws say it’s unfair to make private companies compete with tax funded government agencies that don’t need to turn a profit to survive. On Tuesday, President Obama sided with the critics.

“The Obama Administration believes that consumers should have the option to provide themselves broadband services through local government and locally-owned utilities and that state and local policy should support a level playing field for these community-based solutions,” reads a White House report on community broadband initiatives.

The debate over the future of municipal broadband is central to both the economic development of communities across the US—and to the future of investment in broadband infrastructure. Improvements to the state of broadband can’t come soon enough. The US lags behind countries like South Korea and the Czech Republic in both speed and cost of internet access.

Sure, the rise of Google Fiber has spurred competition both in cities lke Austin, where Google has only recently begun rolling out service, and areas that some providers think could be next on Google’s list. But there’s no guarantee that Google Fiber will spread beyond a very limited number of cities, and some communities are being left further behind in the broadband revolution than others. While 94 percent of Americans living in urban areas can purchase broadband faster than 25mbps, only 51 percent of rural Americans can purchase access at those speeds, according to the report.

The report also says that 30 percent of homes have no broadband connection, and high prices for access is a big part of that. Plus, there’s not much competition in most cities: 40 percent of US citizens have only one company in their area that can provide fixed line connections faster than 10mbps—if they have any option at that speed at all. “Without strong competition, providers can (and do) raise prices, delay investments, and provide sub-par quality of service,” the report says.

Projects such as those in Chattanooga bring much needed competition to their communities, but these projects don’t always work out well. Provo, Utah financed a municipal network that struggled for years before it was eventually acquired by Google Fiber.

But the report argues that the mere possibility of having to compete with municipal projects can improve service from private companies, citing a study that found that cable television providers were more likely to upgrade their infrastructure if they faced the threat that municipal utilities would enter their markets. And if there’s one thing that just about everyone in the debate agrees on, it’s that we need more competition in the broadband sector.

Possible treatments identified for highly contagious stomach virus

Antibiotics aren't supposed to be effective against viruses. But new evidence in mice suggests antibiotics may help fight norovirus, a highly contagious gastrointestinal virus, report scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

The researchers found antibiotics could help prevent norovirus infections. The same team also showed that a recently identified immune system molecule can cure persistent norovirus infections even in mice with partially disabled immune systems. The surprising findings, available online in Science, will appear Jan. 16 in the journal's print edition.

Outbreaks of norovirus are notoriously difficult to contain and can spread quickly on cruise ships and in schools, nursing homes and other closed spaces.

The researchers found that norovirus works its way into gut tissue in mice that have been pretreated with antibiotics but that the virus cannot establish a persistent infection. Follow-up studies showed that norovirus needs a bacterial collaborator to establish a persistent infection in the gut. Eradicating the bacterial partner with an antibiotic can prevent persistent norovirus infection in mice.

"The virus actually requires the bacteria to create a persistent infection," said senior author Herbert W. Virgin IV, MD, PhD, the Edward Mallinckrodt Professor of Pathology and head of the Department of Pathology and Immunology. "The virus appears to have a symbiotic relationship with the bacteria -- they share the job of establishing persistence."

No studies have indicated that animals or insects carry and spread human norovirus. Therefore, scientists suspect that the sources of outbreaks may be people who have persistent norovirus infections but don't have symptoms, such as stomach pain, nausea, diarrhea and vomiting. Virgin and his team decided to explore this possibility by studying a mouse model of chronic norovirus infection.

In additional tests, the scientists found they could restore the norovirus infections by transplanting fecal material from untreated mice into mice that earlier had been treated with the antibiotics. The transplants contained the bacteria eliminated by the antibiotics.

The scientists also looked for mouse proteins essential to preventing chronic norovirus infections. They found that a receptor protein for an immune inflammatory factor known as interferon lambda was required for antibiotics to prevent infection. Giving the mice interferon lambda also prevented norovirus infection, suggesting it also should be evaluated as a treatment for norovirus.

In the second study, the Washington University researchers reported that treatment with interferon lambda offers a significant advantage: It not only prevents the start of persistent norovirus infections but also eliminates established persistent infections. This was true even in mice lacking immune cells that scientists thought were essential to eradicating viral infections.

"I believe that's a new concept in immunology," said Virgin. "We thought that interferon lambda and other related molecules in the immune system could only contain viral infections until other parts of the immune system, including antibodies and T cells, finished the job."

The researchers speculated that other viruses and bacteria may form similar symbiotic partnerships in humans.

"We need a much more detailed understanding of how antibiotic treatment affects the links among host, bacteria and virus," Virgin said.

Story Source:

The above story is based on materials provided by Washington University in St. Louis . The original article was written by Michael C. Purdy. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Bacteria as individual as people? Study of rhizobium from plant roots suggests yes

Bacteria are as individual as people, according to new research by Professor Peter Young and his team in the Department of Biology at the University of York. Bacteria are essential to health, agriculture and the environment, and new research tools are starting to shed more light on them.

The York team dug up a square metre of roadside verge on the University campus in search of a bacterium called Rhizobium leguminosarum. The name means "root dweller of the legumes," and these bacteria are natural fertilizer factories that extract nitrogen from the air and make it available to peas, beans, clover and their wild relatives.

In the laboratory, the team extracted the bacteria from the plant roots and established 72 separate strains. They determined the DNA sequence of the genome of each strain. Their research, published in Open Biology, shows that each of those 72 strains is unique -- each has different genes and is capable of growing on different food sources.

People are unique because each of us inherits half our genes from our mother and half from our father, but bacteria reproduce by binary fission, making two identical daughters. What bacteria are good at, though, is passing packages of genes from one cell to another. It is this process of horizontal gene transfer that made every rhizobium unique.

"We can think of the bacterial genome as having two parts," says Professor Young. "The core genome does the basic housekeeping and is much the same in all members of the species, while the accessory genome has packages of genes that are not essential to the operation of the cell, but can be very useful in coping with aspects of the real world.

"Bacteria are like smartphones. Each phone comes out of the factory with standard hardware and operating system (core genome), but gains a unique combination of capabilities through apps (accessory genes) downloaded through the internet (by horizontal gene transfer)."

We increasingly recognize the vital roles played by bacterial communities, such as those in our gut or on the roots of plants. Many researchers have used variation in a standard core gene to draw up lists of the species in a community, but the new research shows that a list of names is not sufficient.

"There may be 300 people called Baker in your city, but you can't assume that there are 300 people baking bread," explains Professor Young.

It is possible, with more sequencing effort, to look at all the genes in a bacterial community -- an approach called "metagenomics" -- but to understand how they are functioning we also need to know which genes occur together in the same bacterium. This new study helps us to understand the way in which bacterial genomes are assembled.

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The above story is based on materials provided by University of York . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

For Wii U, Nintendo Announces More Amiibos Than Games

Nintendo

Nintendo had another “Nintendo Direct” live-streamed presentation this morning, with different, simulcast versions for the U.S., Europe, and Japan. None of the streams had much to say about new games for its Wii U console.

But… would you like to buy some Amiibos?

Thus far, Nintendo has released 18 of its $13 interactive character figurines, which work with Super Smash Bros. and other Wii U games. It’s had serious trouble keeping them in stock in America, where the figures with lower production runs have disappeared from stores instantly, never to return, only to show up en masse on eBay minutes later for inflated prices. Figures with higher production runs like Mario and Yoshi are easy to find, but other figures had one shipment and disappeared. (Nintendo of America said today it would produce more of the “Marth” Amiibo, which currently sells for upwards of $150 on eBay, later this year.)

With Nintendo’s new announcements today, it seems it may be even tougher in the near future to collect all of the Amiibos. It already planned on releasing 11 more figurines in the Super Smash line in February. Today, it said it would release another 6 character figurines for that game: Wario, Pac-Man, Ness, Robin, Lucina and Charizard. Then, on March 20, it’ll put a whole new wave of Super Mario-branded Amiibo onto shelves, with new sculpts of Mario, Yoshi, Toad, Peach, Bowser and Luigi.

So if you’re counting, that means in just over two months’ time there will be 41 (!) different Amiibo figurines on shelves. At $13 each, that’s a cool $533 before taxes.

Anybody Got Any Games?

Nintendo’s cutesy third-person multiplayer shooter for Wii U, Splatoon, in which players take on the role of adorable octopus-children and squirt colored ink instead of machine guns, is on track for a May release around the world, Nintendo said.

Mario Party 10, which will work with all of the Mario-series Amiibo figurines, is due on March 20.

And the release date of Kirby and the Rainbow Curse was delayed by 7 days to February 20, probably to avoid coinciding with the launch of the New Nintendo 3DS XL here in the U.S.

But so far, that’s the extent of the game release dates that Nintendo will commit to for the U.S. for the first part of 2015.

Nintendo supplemented its announcements with new content for existing games. It will add new playable characters Young Link and Tingle to last year’s Hyrule Warriors. And using the Toad Amiibo figurine on Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker will unlock a new objective in each of the game’s levels — a “Pixel Toad” character for players to find.

How an Apple Rumor Sparked a Sapphire Revolution

Getty Images

For years, Gorilla Glass was the toughest material a mobile device could use to protect its delicate display components. A mix of silicon dioxide, aluminum, sodium, and magnesium, Corning’s scratch-resistant composite material was the gold standard in protecting a smartphone’s display against breakage. But starting around mid-2013, a new option became visible: sapphire.

While more expensive to produce than Gorilla Glass, sapphire is significantly tougher. It’s up to three times stronger; diamond is the only material hard enough to nick it. Apple was widely rumored to be moving to sapphire displays in its mobile devices, particularly after the Cupertino company partnered with GT Advanced Technologies in the construction of a Mesa, Arizona sapphire production plant.

That arrangement didn’t pan out. Sapphire didn’t make it into the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus as reported (other than in its camera lens), and the factory was repurposed after GT Advanced filed for bankruptcy. It turns out it’s very challenging to build sapphire into larger devices like smartphones and tablets, according to DisplaySearch analyst Calvin Hseih, who I spoke with over email. First, it’s far more expensive, costing multiple dollars per square inch compared to roughly five cents per square inch for glass. It can still be chipped or cracked if dropped at the right angle. And, Hseih says, it has a lower optical transmission than glass, which necessitates greater backlight power consumption. Apple’s proposed solution to these challenges wasn’t actually a pure sapphire display cover glass, like we’d see on a watch: According to its sapphire-related patent filings, Apple’s phone displays would have a very thin sapphire layer coated or laminated onto the glass. This takes advantage of the material’s hardness without adding undue strain on battery life or making it too expensive for people to afford. But this design couldn’t be executed at a satisfactory quality level in time.

Even though sapphire never made it into the iPhone’s display, between interest in the new material and its maturation in the market, we’re now seeing sapphire on a growing number of mobile products. Huawei announced a special edition 5-inch sapphire display-touting P7 smartphone, shown off at CES, that’s currently on sale in China. And leaks of the Xiaomi Mi5 show it should be featuring sapphire on its face when it debuts this month. LG and Samsung are also rumored to be developing sapphire-fronted smartphones in the wake of Apple’s efforts.

Garmin

Like it or not, Apple is a trendsetter in the smartphone space. Following the addition of Touch ID to the iPhone 5s, a number of other smartphones including models from Samsung, HTC, and Huawei began featuring similar biometric scanners. After the iPhone became available in gold, other smartphone makers also made models available in the metallic hue. In both of these cases, as with the sapphire display, rumors of the feature pre-dated the actual release of the product, and options from multiple manufacturers were available within months of the iPhone’s release—if not sooner. The quick delivery of these features suggests that these companies weren’t waiting around to see what Apple would officially announce, but were rather acting on industry rumors and back-channel whispers of the goings on in manufacturing plants.

Sapphire is also making its way into wearables. Apple, of course, has a big stake in the space with the upcoming, sapphire-fronted Apple Watch. But the material has been a staple in mid to high-end watches for many years now, and is a staple across the watch industry. It was a natural fit then that the Apple Watch, being a fashion-minded wrist thing, would be available with the premium crystal as an option.

And of course, because of an Apple-fueled explosion of interest in smartwatches, and because the material is a natural fit for wrist-worn displays, sapphire has become the choice du jour for high-end wearables focused on durability. Garmin’s new rugged Fenix 3 GPS watch and an activity tracker called Wellograph, which is geared toward competitive athletes, are among those adding sapphire faces. In Garmin’s case, the sapphire model will command a $100 premium over the $500 base price.

How an Apple Rumor Sparked a Sapphire Revolution

Getty Images

For years, Gorilla Glass was the toughest material a mobile device could use to protect its delicate display components. A mix of silicon dioxide, aluminum, sodium, and magnesium, Corning’s scratch-resistant composite material was the gold standard in protecting a smartphone’s display against breakage. But starting around mid-2013, a new option became visible: sapphire.

While more expensive to produce than Gorilla Glass, sapphire is significantly tougher. It’s up to three times stronger; diamond is the only material hard enough to nick it. Apple was widely rumored to be moving to sapphire displays in its mobile devices, particularly after the Cupertino company partnered with GT Advanced Technologies in the construction of a Mesa, Arizona sapphire production plant.

That arrangement didn’t pan out. Sapphire didn’t make it into the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus as reported (other than in its camera lens), and the factory was repurposed after GT Advanced filed for bankruptcy. It turns out it’s very challenging to build sapphire into larger devices like smartphones and tablets, according to DisplaySearch analyst Calvin Hseih, who I spoke with over email. First, it’s far more expensive, costing multiple dollars per square inch compared to roughly five cents per square inch for glass. It can still be chipped or cracked if dropped at the right angle. And, Hseih says, it has a lower optical transmission than glass, which necessitates greater backlight power consumption. Apple’s proposed solution to these challenges wasn’t actually a pure sapphire display cover glass, like we’d see on a watch: According to its sapphire-related patent filings, Apple’s phone displays would have a very thin sapphire layer coated or laminated onto the glass. This takes advantage of the material’s hardness without adding undue strain on battery life or making it too expensive for people to afford. But this design couldn’t be executed at a satisfactory quality level in time.

Even though sapphire never made it into the iPhone’s display, between interest in the new material and its maturation in the market, we’re now seeing sapphire on a growing number of mobile products. Huawei announced a special edition 5-inch sapphire display-touting P7 smartphone, shown off at CES, that’s currently on sale in China. And leaks of the Xiaomi Mi5 show it should be featuring sapphire on its face when it debuts this month. LG and Samsung are also rumored to be developing sapphire-fronted smartphones in the wake of Apple’s efforts.

Garmin

Like it or not, Apple is a trendsetter in the smartphone space. Following the addition of Touch ID to the iPhone 5s, a number of other smartphones including models from Samsung, HTC, and Huawei began featuring similar biometric scanners. After the iPhone became available in gold, other smartphone makers also made models available in the metallic hue. In both of these cases, as with the sapphire display, rumors of the feature pre-dated the actual release of the product, and options from multiple manufacturers were available within months of the iPhone’s release—if not sooner. The quick delivery of these features suggests that these companies weren’t waiting around to see what Apple would officially announce, but were rather acting on industry rumors and back-channel whispers of the goings on in manufacturing plants.

Sapphire is also making its way into wearables. Apple, of course, has a big stake in the space with the upcoming, sapphire-fronted Apple Watch. But the material has been a staple in mid to high-end watches for many years now, and is a staple across the watch industry. It was a natural fit then that the Apple Watch, being a fashion-minded wrist thing, would be available with the premium crystal as an option.

And of course, because of an Apple-fueled explosion of interest in smartwatches, and because the material is a natural fit for wrist-worn displays, sapphire has become the choice du jour for high-end wearables focused on durability. Garmin’s new rugged Fenix 3 GPS watch and an activity tracker called Wellograph, which is geared toward competitive athletes, are among those adding sapphire faces. In Garmin’s case, the sapphire model will command a $100 premium over the $500 base price.